SOURCE: "Revolutionary Women and Others," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 122-34.

In the following excerpt, Kearns favorably reviews Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, calling Powers "an archeologist of imagination and style."

It isn't often that a novelist makes a debut with a work as ambitious and dazzling as Richard Powers' Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. It is a work of such complex structure, managed easily and with enormous assurance, that an attempt to describe it other than sketchily would take several paragraphs. The frontispiece reproduces a striking photograph made in 1914 of three young men, hatted, carrying canes, posed but pretending casually to have halted as they walk along a dirt path. The dance they are on their way to, we discover, was a village fête, but also the First World War as Dance of Death. The picture...